As the K-Pop music genre becomes more popular internationally, more and more K-Pop songs and artists are appearing on music charts in different countries at increasingly high rankings. While a decade or so it used to be rare for K-Pop songs to make it onto Billboard charts at all, for example, now it’s pretty much a given for more popular artists.
Recently, some fans took a look at how the “Big Four” labels — that is, SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, YG Entertainment, and HYBE Labels — have performed on an international level in 2023. And while the overall results are pretty impressive, the people who didn’t end up performing as well as others might surprise you.
For the highly coveted “Billboard Hot 100” chart, all but one of the “Big Four” had at least one of their artists rank. HYBE Labels had both BTS‘s members and NewJeans rank multiple times on the chart, with both Jimin and Jungkook peaking at #1 with “Like Crazy” and “Seven” respectively, and NewJeans peaking at #48 with “Super Shy”.
JYP Entertainment also had two artists chart — TWICE and Stray Kids. TWICE peaked at #84 with “Moonlight Sunrise”, while Stray Kids just recently made it onto the chart with “LALALALA” peaking at #90. Meanwhile, YG Entertainment had both BLACKPINK and Taeyang make it onto the chart, peaking at #13 and #76 respectively.
SM Entertainment, on the other hand, didn’t have any of their artists rank in the “Billboard Hot 100” chart this year.
When it comes to Spotify, only two of the four labels — HYBE Labels and YG Entertainment — had their artists rank in the ten most-streamed K-Pop songs of 2023. HYBE had Jungkook, Jimin, and NewJeans rank with a total of six songs, and YG Entertainment had three songs by BLACKPINK and their solo members rank. Once again, SM Entertainment is notable absent, as is JYP Entertainment.
Most-streamed K-Pop songs on Spotify in 2023
Finally, all of the “Big Four” except for SM Entertainment also had at least one of their artists make in into the top ten most-streamed K-Pop artists this year. HYBE Labels takes the lead with six artists — BTS, Jungkook, Jimin, SEVENTEEN, TXT, and LE SSERAFIM — while JYP had two artists, TWICE and Stray Kids, make the ranks. Finally, YG Entertainment also made it onto the list with BLACKPINK.
Most-streamed K-pop artists on Spotify in 2023
This data was recently shared on an online forum post, where netizens shared their thoughts on SM Entertainment’s absence and the overall results.
It will be interesting to see how this data changes in the future as the K-Pop genre continues to spread worldwide!
